Let's
remember the Nintendo 64 Castlevanias briefly - they were valent,
rather fun attempt to bring the classic series into the new dimesnion,
but the sluggish controls never won it many fans. Fast forward five
years and now we have Lament of Innocence, the next attempt for Konami
at 3D. However, instead of following in the footsteps Symphony of the
Night (as they've been doing with the GBA games), the producers decided
that, once again, the series was in need of a reinventing by liberally
infusing some fresh blood into its veins. The result is a quality game
that, while flawed, is still one of the best actions titles on the PS2.

The
game begins with a bit of backstory, telling the story of two warriors
in medieval Europe - holy knight Leon Belmont and tactician Mathis
Cronqvist. As the tale begins, Mathias' wife dies of an illness, and
not a year passes before Leon's own bride, Sara, is mysteriously
kidnapped. Mathias informs Leon of a vampire who dwells in a forest
called Eternal Night, and without a thought, Leon sets off to do his
courageous deeds. Before even entering the castle, he runs across a
mysterious old man named Rinaldo Gandolfi, who bequests Leon his whip.
After this somewhat lengthy exposition, the battle begins. After a
brief tutorial, you are given free run of five levels, with the sixth
and final level opening up when they are completed.

Small
bits of plot and character development are expoused after each boss
fight, but the general plot doesn't go anywhere until the game. Despite
the general predictability of the overall plot and some lame dialogue,
there's actually some surprising substance here, and the English voice
acting is marginally competant, although Japanese voices are here for
the purists.

And while it's become popular to call any 3D
action game a Devil May Cry ripoff - don't. While the general action
feel has borrowed liberally from its purported Capcom forebearer,
there's enough differentiation that it stands as its own game. The
camera, for one, is usually zoomed out so a large portion of the room
is visibile at all times. It's not perfect, and it doesn't quite keep
up in boss battles, but it also works much better than a majority of
games this type, even if some people cry over the lack of manual camera
control.

The biggest differentiation lies within the basic
castle design. While the more recent Castlevania games have had a heavy
concentration on item collection, Lament of Innocence feels like an
honest-to-goodness dungeon crawler. There are generally a handful of
unique rooms in a level, connected with identical corridors. This
initially feels very repetetive, especially given the somewhat dull
room layout, the lack of variety, and the general look of the levels -
this IS an 11th century castle, but the dark, grey brick and marble
facade does wear thin. Some stages are better than others - the Ghostly
Theatre stands out the most - and the rooms with platforming or vague
puzzles elements are pretty well thought out, but when you walk through
the same hallway for the thirtieth time, you begin to get the feeling
that maybe Konami should've spent more time with this instead of
needless padding it out and artifically lengthening playtime.

Unfortunately,
this also somewhat harms the exploration aspects - while there's a
whole gamut hidden relics and items littered throughout the castle,
they all require an overwhelming amount of backtracking. You don't need
to refight enemies in rooms you've already beaten, but without warp
points, it becomes a pain to lug through a level from beginning to end
just to find a key or some mostly useless tertiary item, especially
given the sameness that permeates throughout.

With the
general design a bit lacking, it comes as a blessing that the combat
system is actually fairly deep - there are two types of whip attacks,
and by combining them, you can eventually learn some fancy combos to
inflict more damage. Then there's the subweaponry system - lifting
liberally from the Spell Fusion system of Harmony of Dissonance, Leon
can combine any of the subweapons found lying throughout the castle
with one of seven colored orbs to produce some rather impressive spell
effects. The implementation runs a bit smoother here than in Harmony -
the map marks the locations of all subweapons, and the slightly harder
difficulty level means that you'll actually need to rely on them to get
out of binds quite often.

The one aspect that stands out
above all others is the music - composer Michiru Yamane has composed a
masterpiece that almost surpasses Symphony of the Night. The styles
range from orchestral to dance, with a bit of opera thrown in. It's not
quite as diverse as Symphony, and there aren't nearly as many songs,
but all of the main stage themes are excellent. Most of the music is
completely new, although there are a few bonus songs (including the
ending theme) that pays homage to Castlevania classics. Most of the
bosses even have their own theme music. Even with the unimaginative
level designs, the background music makes whipping guys a devilish
pleasure.

In spite of its flaws, once you get into its
mindset, Lament of Innocence actually becomes a rather fun game, as
long as you're into the "kill all enemies then move on" mentality of
dungeon crawlers. If nothing else, it has plenty of good ideas that
need some time to brew, so here's hoping they get further developed in
the next installment.

Thanks to Jason Staggs for the promo
booklet scans, Tenshi no Shi for the magazine scan, CapcomMDB for the
Joachim pic, and Setzer the Gambler for all of the limited edition
scans.